A List of Colleges' Plans for Reopening in the Fall - <AUTHOR> https://www.chronicle.com/article/Here-s-a-List-of-Colleges-/248626 <comment><USER2> High schooler here. On-line school is far from perfect. There are two approaches I've seen:

1\. The "self-taught" style. This one is being done by my linear algebra class: the prof tells us which chapters to read, sends out notes, and some recommended problems. Periodically, he sends out a take-home test; we work it and send him the answers. This style is helped by the fact that our book is short and concise enough to teach but still be readable. No one wants to read if a chapter takes hours. This approach works great for me, but it requires a more self-directed student to function.

2\. The "micro-manager" style. This one is being done by my physics class: the prof uses online, checked homework, multiple zoom calls, requires us to record videos of ourselves solving problems in a "tutorial style", gives on-line quizzes, and attempts to give the same tests on-line as were given in-person. This results in horrible, invasive solutions that give a "proctor" remote access to one's computer, require one to use a webcam to be monitored, and require one to show the space around him using a mirror. This style is awful, wastes colossal amounts of time, but is the option on which teachers fall back when they lack confidence in their students to be self-directed.

Most teachers are going for option 2, which is worse than in-person learning. This may sound cynical, but mot of the tools for "active learning" or "on-line engagement" make students' lives harder, waste their time, and offer no benefit beyond an administrator feeling as though he's "done something".

Edit: can any current student tell me if y'all are getting refunded for room and board, at least partially? Y'all paid for something and are being prohibited from using it, so that seems reasonable.

<comment><USER3> Per issues with #2, they are assuming that the webcams of students are unmodified.

Yellow highlighters' coloring is called 'Solvent Green 7' and has a peak at about 494nm.

You can buy filters for lenses that will knock out certain bandwidths of light and keep the rest coming into the camera. These are called notch filters, as they take a notch out of the light.

There just so happens to be a notch filter that _should_ know out the yellow highlighter color. Meaning that the light reflected from a yellow highlighter will not enter into the camera.

[https://www.thorlabs.com/thorproduct.cfm?partnumber=NF488-15](https://www.thorlabs.com/thorproduct.cfm?partnumber=NF488-15)

They are _not_ cheap though, and as such, I've not tried this at home to see how well it works.

Other solutions may exist at to the ideas that these people may have about how your webcam is working. I'd experiment with other lenses, polarized filters, exposure times, etc.

That said, studying is a _lot_ easier than trying to jerry-rig your webcams.

<comment><USER4> Although those physical approaches are fascinating, I think there must be an easier software solution. How hard can it be to live edit the webcam recording so that half of the frame is a static picture? Then you just have notes flat on your desk... And the webcam will show it empty.

Alternatively, one could run a VM with the monitoring software, and have a separate window with notes. As long as the mirror is angled so to hide a small portion of the screen that should be good enough.

To build on your physical solution using polarization: that's easier. You can apply a polarized filter to the webcam (you can get one from an old pair of 3d glasses) and then have the notes on a secondary screen that will then look completely dark on webcam. Maybe lay the device on a black background so it's not obvious that there's a "turned off" device and you're done.

This is all a fun thought experiment. I don't have invasive professors, thankfully. They simply made all tests open book and raised the difficulty of the questions accordingly. That being said, I enjoy trying to work arounf hypothetical limitations...

<comment><USER5> But this is on a thread about high school. You're _way_ over thinking it. Just ratchet down the bandwidth available to the relevant machine (or straight up disable the video feed). Easy peasy. What's the teacher going to do, fail you for not being rich enough to afford a good internet connection? They aren't paid well enough to take that risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel bad for the colleges. But anyone in their right mind that's going to college to learn things will take a gap year.

Those going to college just for the paper are well advised to keep going. The next couple of years will be easy mode, for sure. _You get an A, and you get an A--everyone gets an A!_

<comment><USER7> "... If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn't really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that almost no one tries this route — saving hundreds of thousands of dollars along the way — is a strong sign that students understand the value of certification over actual learning..."

"...Educational austerity is the simplest path back to an economy in which serious on-the-job learning starts during high school — not after college."

[https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caplan- education...](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caplan-education- credentials-20180211-story.html)

<comment><USER8> Is this still True? I didn't go to the institution in question, but we had ID cards that we had to show when entering the building.

Also I think a more obvious example of it being popular is the courses and lectures that are made freely available online.

<comment><USER9> Notice that he does a neat little switch there. He talks about Princeton, then he says "As a professor", then he talks about Princeton again. He's a professor at George Mason. I think anyone can figure out why he used Princeton rather than the place he works without actually stating the name of his employer.

<comment><USER6> It's odd, for sure, but perhaps he just uses _Princeton_ as a relatable example. Most of us have never heard of _George Mason_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Many college towns and rental properties relying on student income will be devastated.

<comment><USER11> Forgive me, but I find it a bit hard to be sympathetic in a broad sense to the organizations that make their money from rental income.

<comment><USER12> Baffling comment. Providing rental property is a legitimate business.

<comment><USER13> Providing rental property is yet another industry in which "Why don't we just screw over people with no options" has prevailed. It may be legitimate in that people need places to live, but it is far from legitimate in any way regarding getting what is paid for.

<comment><USER12> Stating that being a landlord is "far from legitimate in any way regarding getting what is paid for" is really a grotesque exaggeration.

<comment><USER13> I suppose you haven't rented an apartment in a major city...

<comment><USER12> Because you have had bad experiences renting apartments, that means an entire sector of the economy is illegitimate? There's a lot more variety to rentals than that.

<comment><USER13> We can agree to disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I moved back home after my university moved my classes to online (mid-march). I'm now paying rent on an apartment I don't need and have a lease for next school year that I might not use. Even if in-person classes start again, I'll have to worry about being screwed again next spring. The only other option I could think of was subleasing but unfortunately I signed my lease in January.

<comment><USER13> Usually breaking a lease is 1.5-2.5x a month's rent. This will definitely be cheaper than paying for an apartment you won't use, even though it sucks.

<comment><USER11> This depends on the jurisdiction and the terms of the lease. Most places in the US, there are very few ways to break a lease without a clause in the contract allowing it.

For example, in New York, if you break a lease the landlord is obligated to make a "reasonable effort" to re-rent the apartment. You are still on the hook in the interim. In the current environment, the apartment probably won't be re-rented.

<comment><USER13> Saying anything other than "It depends on the lease" isn't really valuable, so that's what I'll respond with. It depends on the lease.

<comment><USER11> Yes, that is the problem I had with your original comment.

But the jurisdiction is also important, not just the terms of the lease.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I highly suspect that many large public universities will make large lectures online and cap in person enrollment for discussion/seminar/lab. You can probably easily ramp up hiring for these since they're mostly grad students, and frankly grad students are cheap (I say this as one).

<comment><USER5> STEM grad students are surprisingly expensive given how poorly they're paid and how valuable their work is (I say this as a former grad student, but also as someone who budgets for them).

Universities will now have to cull "overhead". Grad students and professors will have a golden opportunity about 1-2 years from now to capture a less tiny fraction of the wealth they create. Don't let it go to waste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> CFR for those aged 60 or greater is at 6.4%[0]. And of course an even larger percentage will end up hospitalized. How many professors are in that high risk demographic? Class is just supposed to go on while professors inevitably fall ill, become hospitalized and die?

[0][https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099\(20\)30243-7/fulltext)

<comment><USER17> My guess is there will be mandatory testing for students wanting to return, along with heavy disease surveillance. I also suspect even places claiming "normal operation" will not actually be normal — certain things will be virtual and other things not. There will likely be some reshuffling of teaching assignments too.

I noticed also (former professor) that my institution is now heavily incentivizing early retirement for those getting close to qualifying, and are not shy about linking it to coronavirus.

Finally, I think a lot of social distancing guidelines apply technically in many situations with lectures, etc.

It will be an interesting semester.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It is just my personal opinion but if I was in a position to plan for the upcoming academic year in US, I'd recommend below.

\- Start Fall semester with onsite classes.

\- For those who wish to participate remotely for medical reasons or personal preference, they should be allowed to teach/learn remotely.

\- But everyone (administration, profs, students, support staff, local town/city) should be prepared to have the teaching go virtual with the campus shutting down on a short notice.

\- If Covid-19 reappears locally or surges again nationally, campus should close down.

I say at least start the upcoming semester in Fall 2020 with onsite classes, for the sake of human bonds to form between the students/professors. It may sound too unpredictable but I think having even one or two months of in person interaction would be beneficial for the incoming freshman class.

Also, dorm/parking/housing cost probably should be charged in monthly increments, not per semester, to prepare for possible shutdown of campus in the middle of a semester.

</comment><comment><USER19> I work for a student lender (for postgrad degrees only), we're scrambling to handle all the classes that are being postponed, or telling their students not to fly and they'll start online (since we lend to international students, the date they are in country matters a lot).

</comment><comment><USER12> Hard to imagine packing up and moving across the country into a dorm, taking the risk of being kicked out a few weeks later.

<comment><USER20> Harder still to imagine being 18 and deciding to play it safe and stay with mom and dad for god-knows how many more months. I'd take the risk if I was able.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> tl;dr: Basically everyone will decide this summer.

<comment><USER22> They'll decide again when they have an outbreak in a dorm or when a few faculty members die. It's hard to imagine that presence instruction will be back in the fall.

<comment><USER23> I'm a little surprised by this sentiment (maybe I'm naively optimistic). I'm curious, do you (and others) think elementary and high schools will be back next fall?

<comment><USER24> I suspect there will be a lot of pressure from parents to reinstitute in- person schooling so they have daycare.

I suspect we'll also see our first couple of disease clusters and super spreaders with associated deaths clearly attributable to a child in school. (I hope to god we'll have some compassion and keep the kids' names out of this, but I doubt it.)

Once that hits the news, I suspect lots of parents will refuse to put their kids in school.

In CA, for example, this may have devastating effects on the school district: they get money on an asses-in-seats basis [1]. I suspect that home schooling is about to have an enormous boom.

[1] [https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/how-do- you-...](https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/how-do-you-say-here- in-a-virtual-classroom/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The List, because wall:

Beloit College

Boston University

Brown University

California Baptist University

California State University at Fullerton

Chapman University

Centre College

Christopher Newport University

Claremont Colleges

Clemson University

Cornell University

Drury University

East Tennessee State University

Emory University

George Mason University

George Washington University

Harvard University

Haverford College

Iowa Board of Regents Iowa, and the University of Northern Iowa

Macalester College

Marquette University

Merrimack College

Montana State University

North Carolina State University

North Dakota State University

Oakland University

Ohio State University

Purdue University

San Jose State University

Shenandoah University

Southern New Hampshire University

Stanford University

Trine University

University of Arizona

University of Arkansas at Fayetteville

University of Colorado at Boulder

University of Connecticut

University of Central Florida

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of Maine system

University of Mary Washington

University of Maryland system

University of Michigan

University of Missouri

University of Nebraska

University of Oklahoma

University of Oregon

University of Portland

University of Pittsburgh

University of South Carolina

University of Tennessee at Knoxville

University of Texas at Austin

University of Virginia

Utah System of Higher Education

Virginia Commonwealth University

Virginia Tech University

Wake Forest University

Washington State University

Wayne State University

West Virginia University

William Jewell College

Williams College

Yale University

<comment><USER26> Sorry if I'm missing something, but is that the list of colleges that _will_ be onsite in the fall?

<comment><USER6> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It was announced today that experts are already doubting the possibility of hosting the Tokyo Olympics even in the summer of 2021, because a vaccine may not be available or widely applied then. I suspect we are going to see a new wave of cancellations of things we initially thought might resume by the end of 2020 or mid-2021. I don't know if this will affect enrollment of local students who wouldn't have to travel to campus, but the conference side of academia may be disrupted, i.e. everything which was scheduled for 2020 and was recently postponed to 2021, may not happen even then. Expect a lot of complaining from academics about this being a lost two years (at least) for them in terms of in-person networking and career advancement.</comment>


Show HN: Zam – A new JavaScript Library that's a faster alternative - zamjs-router https://github.com/roecrew/zam/ <comment><AUTHOR> Why you use XMLHttpRequest instead of Fetch API (which makes ajax utilities more or less useless)?

It would also be nice to have a custom ajax error handling. Console logging is nice to have, but sometimes you maybe want to throw in custom error handling.

<comment> zamjs-router "Why you use XMLHttpRequest instead of Fetch API"

I've been going back and forth on this one.

The faster one is dependent upon the browser.

[https://github.com/arendjr/fetch-vs-xhr- perf](https://github.com/arendjr/fetch-vs-xhr-perf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the explantation. I wasn't aware of this (but i guess this will change when the fetch API is more widely used and vendors are implementing faster methods).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Wouldn't it make sense to say what it's a faster alternative _to_?

<comment> zamjs-router It's a faster alternative to React, jQuery, and Zepto. I'm going to test against Vue today.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you elaborate how this is an alternative to React? I see this could be a lightweight alternative to jQuery, but React?

<comment> zamjs-router "React allows developers to create large web-applications that use data and can change over time without reloading the page. It aims primarily to provide speed, simplicity, and scalability"

You can do the 'almost' same thing with with Zam, but without the slow Virtual DOM. I say 'almost', because you really need to be good at vanillajs if you expect to create a massive and scalable web application that's written in Zam.

<comment><USER3> Well, in the programming world you can do 'almost' anything with anything, basically. So -- if you really good at it -- anything is an alternative to anything else.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do BitTorent Bundles work - <AUTHOR> http://bundle-help.bittorrent.com/customer/portal/articles/1697610-what-is-a-protected-torrent-?b_id=3886

<comment><USER2> I would guess that they do it similarly to private trackers. Each user gets a unique and secret ID which is transmitted when announcing. The tracker then decides if the user is allowed to get the swarm details.

<comment><USER3> Does that have the same benefits in terms of distributing the sources?

I just purchased the new Thom Yorke album [0] via a bundle and it felt like a regular torrent. Very quick to download etc.

[0] [https://bundles.bittorrent.com/bundles/d0b4beba8efc4b46f6dba...](https://bundles.bittorrent.com/bundles/d0b4beba8efc4b46f6dba119b511a5b2d5cabc96168c0dc097ee9d514059ab63)

<comment><USER4> See what kind of announce URL is included in the .torrent. Is it just

        udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce

or does it include information that could be used to identify you, like

        http://tracker.bittorrentbundle.net:3000/3pr4s5y7l9nh0mdwcqyh3a9k6n7d0kta/announce

Other than tracker identifying you, seeding and downloading works the same in both cases.

<comment><USER5> Just anyone else is wondering, it's:

        http://tracker.bundles.bittorrent.com/tracker/{a whole lot of hex}

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> lawyers.

regardless of how they configure their trackers, this only works if people dont use clients that use others trackers

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure why you're downvoted, technically you are (probably?) correct.

If they use technology similar to private trackers, that won't help against peer exchange.

And yes I think other trackers could announce the same torrent and have people join the same swarm.

I could not imagine what else they'd do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It appears that Thom Yorke's new album has been released using this feature:

[https://bundles.bittorrent.com/bundles/d0b4beba8efc4b46f6dba...](https://bundles.bittorrent.com/bundles/d0b4beba8efc4b46f6dba119b511a5b2d5cabc96168c0dc097ee9d514059ab63)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes that was why I asked. I did not know about Bundles or private tracker before downloading this album.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Strangely enough, I downloaded Thom York's album yesterday from Bittorrent Bundle, and this morning my torrent is displaying an error: "Tracker gave HTTP response code 402 (Payment required)".

So I guess it's not very torrent friendly, as I cannot seed any more.

<comment><USER9> Yeah I am getting also a 402 response from the tracker. I wish they would have put up a BEP or something with an explanation of how they're extending the tracker protocol...</comment></comment>


More Tech Magic, if You Can Afford It - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/technology/google-glass-offers-more-tech-magic-if-you-can-afford-it.html?ref=technology&_r=0

<comment><AUTHOR> What's striking to me is the extent to which the past decade's innovations (ad supported web services, carrier subsidized smartphones) have shifted people's perceptions of a reasonable price for technology. Especially for early adopters, who canonically paid more, and got less, and did so willingly play around with an unevenly distributed bit of the future.

For example, the Apple 1 motherboard (to which one needed to add both effort and other parts) costed a diabolical $666.66 in 1976, at a time when the US median income was $11,308. According to a friendly internet inflation calculator, that's $2727.25 in current dollars.

Flash forward to the 80s, and one of the early important popular personal computers debuted for $595 in 1982, or $1435 in current dollars, roughly the price of the Glass prototype today. If you pre ordered it before launch, they'd throw in a cassette drive, so that you would have a place to store programs, as opposed to having to type them in. This was a $70 value.

Thanks to Moore's Law and mass market adoption the price of these innovations, as with so many others came down in price, and afforded more a more capabilities to a broader and broader audiences. This was true for almost all personal technology that succeeded from the 70s through the 90s, and is true for many technologies today--such as 3D printing.

It is however strikingly not true for a lot of the web based services that people call to mind when they think of innovation today--it was free to join Twitter, say, and as an early adopter you didn't own something with less features than later adopters--instead you potentially had a first mover advantage, the ability to achieving a critical mass of followers in a way that latecomers might find harder. You paid in attention, a pretty cheap coin, which nevertheless does little to stop the whining when a service disappears after an acquihire.

What's remarkable to someone who isn't in their 20s is that anyone would, well, remark on the fact that cutting edge technology that is actually built and manufactured in the real world would follow this path.

If wearables do become an important tech trend, and unless they rapidly follow the very unusual path that smartphones took (arguably the most rapidly adopted technology in human history), pricing could be very different from what people have come to associate with innovation.</comment>


Ask HN: When was the first text file? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to convey that text files are probably the most future-proof, and would like to say something like "computers as far back as XXXX used the same text files we use today."  Unfortunately, I can't seem to come up with the right Google terms to unearth this bit of computer history.  Any leads? <comment><USER2> ASCII is from 1963. Anything older likely used a different encoding.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> EBCDIC (and its predecessor, BCD) go back farther.</comment>


Strategies for Overcoming Startup Depression - <AUTHOR> http://jevy.org/blog/2012/07/24/strategies-for-overcoming-startup-depression/

<comment><USER2> Make sure you see a doctor. Depression is a serious condition that needs medical attention. My doctor + fluoxetin saved me, my startup and my family.

</comment><comment><USER3> Happy to chat about it if people have questions: AMA. Thanks for the post 21sappers!</comment>


Ask HN: How to ask for a raise at a startup? - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN,
I work for a small (<25 people) but profitable software shop in the US that has been around for a few years. The company has seen very steady growth in terms of revenue (double digit percentages) over the past few years. I have been here for about a year and a half (my second job after graduating from the university) and now feel that it is time to ask for a raise. I think so because I have delivered a number of really large projects for the company and am the "go to" guy for a lot of architecture and software design questions.
My question is how do I ask for a salary raise? Sites like salary.com seem to contain a lot of information about larger or more established businesses which might throw off my numbers. What kind of a percentage bump can you typically expect out of a raise at a profitable startup? Are there any techniques beyond "show your achievements and show that you deserve a raise in the current market" that I could use in the negotiations?
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> Ask like an adult, without confrontation. Don't show achievements, demonstrate value. Request that compensation be in line with your contributions. While you're at it, relate to the corporate goals and your potential impact in future opportunities at the company.

Know what double digit is. It costs a lot to run a 25 person operation, double digit can be 10% (barely close to inflation-bad) or 30%+(good). Understand that most successful businesses, unless they are planning for a large acquisition, increasing cash reserves in light of major market movement, or the like, will budget a reserve for cost-of-living increases to salary. This amount is almost always arbitrarily given to high achievers or out-of-line comp, with the rest thrown back into general fund for unplanned capex.

Understand that you have the option of bringing up that you have personal goals (housing, greater education, financial responsibilities, personal growth) outside of work that you can use the extra resources towards. This shows initiative to grow and not just a move to make a point (remember: confrontation is not always a good move).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the detailed response. The company is definitely in the "good" portion of the spectrum: past couple of years were actually 50%+. I am not sure I understand the distinction you are making between achievements and value. How does one go about demonstrating value without showing past performance? So far my pitch is based on "I have revamped some core systems and processes so that we are a much better company for it and I have become integral to key architecture decisions." listing specific projects that I worked on. Is that not a good approach?

<comment><USER3> _I am not sure I understand the distinction you are making between achievements and value._

I think he means instead of saying "I delivered X project" or "I am the go to guy for architectural questions" you would say "X project which I delivered now earns the company $Y million" or "my expertise at X system saves the company $Y dollars in support contracts". You want them to see that the money you save or earn the company is worth more than the raise you are requesting.

<comment><USER2> Yup. Basically people at the top: \- like pet projects that streamline or strengthen. \- love projects that save money (time is money). \- adore projects that bring in money Top earners show they can do all three.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can you relate your work to the double digit growth?

The percentage of bump and your current role in the company may have a set limit. Analogy: don't hire surgeons to paint a room cause they charge 200/hr when there are people who will do a good job for 20/hr. If you are doing a 20/hr job then that it's the market price.

Is your job or responsibility increasing in value?

If you started off filing paperwork and have now moved into making sales calls then your value has increased. If you are helping the company more then an increase in salary would make sense.

Job offers from another company can also be helpful leverage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately not directly. I am a software developer, and there is not an obvious correlation between "a piece of software is deployed" and "we just got a new client". It is a B2B venture so the total number of clients is pretty small, but each client is very profitable. However, I don't participate in sales or networking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The same way you would when employed by any other type of business.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are certainly similarities, but I feel that with a startup there are some different expectations. For example since I get (a small amount of) stock options, and it is a small company it would not have a large amount of cash stored in the bank the counterargument to me asking for a raise might just be "we are already paying you enough and we cannot afford any more".

The other distinction is that we have no dedicated HR staff so I'll be negotiating directly with the CFO.

<comment><USER6> Since you are probably not privy to your employers actual financials, there is no point speculating.

Just go ahead and ask. If they tell you there's no money, or that they think they're already paying you enough, try to negotiate a re-evaluation in 3 to 6 months.

Decide for yourself if you can live with not getting a raise. Negotiating directly with the CFO beats negotiating with him through an HR person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Read patio11's past comments. He generally has very good advice on this issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I will.</comment></comment>


Peru's archaeologists turn to drones to help protect and explore ancient ruins - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/25/peru-archaeologists-drones-ancient-ruins

<comment><USER2> As a bit of a drone hobbyist (I've got a few that I tinker with) -- it makes me happy to see the technology being used for some amazing stuff (Google's rhino poacher project comes to mind).

It seems that the most we hear about drones being used is to fire missiles into crowded cafes. While truly, the possibilities are endless on the overall good that drone technology will one day provide.

I suppose there's historical precedence here quite often, where a military technology transitions into broader usage.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know if anyone remembers the game MayaQuest, but it was one of my favorite Mac games and I dreamed of exploring the Mayan ruins on a bicycle for years. If drones had existed back then, I think this would have been my dream job.

I guess it's my own fault that I decided it was more realistic to learn how to make games than to imitate the lives depicted in them.

</comment><comment><USER4> When did RC planes and quadcopters become "drones"? They're nothing like the gas-powered, satellite-guided military drones.

<comment><USER5> Well, you can make gas-powered quadcopters at the DIY level, and as far as satellite-guided is concerned, umm: yes.

We have that in the DIY/FOSS drone-builder world. Start here: [http://ardupilot.org/](http://ardupilot.org/)</comment></comment>


The art of the oppressed:There is no such thing as fake news - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tbsmartens/there-is-no-such-thing-as-fake-news-or-why-fake-news-is-the-art-of-the-oppressed-27a5c2385a74?source=linkShare-2aed86203d41-1482107532 <comment><USER2> What a bad article. I mean, starting from the very first parapgraph:

> What puzzles me about the discussions around "fake news", is how everybody > in favor of free speech is now calling for censorship. Like, really? Don't > you see where this will lead — "a Ministry of Truth" and other things that > only 1984 could have envisioned.

There is no one prominent who is arguing for unilateral government censorship of fake news sites. What has been proposed are a series of reforms, usually outside of the legal system, to help people identify blatantly incorrect but otherwise convincing-looking articles on big platforms like Facebook, which bears no resemblance to anything Orwellian.

<comment><AUTHOR> Deleted / I made my point in the original article

<comment><USER2> No fines for fake news are "on the table" in the US.

Obviously policies that are meant to target fake news wouldn't touch opinion pieces about the best Christmas gifts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything is an opinion, isn't?

<comment><USER2> No.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why don't operating systems gzip their startup files? - <AUTHOR>

I was pondering why modern operating systems take so long to start up... We have a huge amount of processing power on each machine after all, and we should be able to process all the required start up routines thousands of times faster than just a few years ago. I realize that the slowest part of modern computers are the hard drives (about 90 Mb/s is high for non-SSD) and not to mention seek times.<p>Which leads me to the question: why not GZIP all the required startup files? In fact, why not TAR them too, and make them sequential? Our modern CPUs would be more than powerful enough to handle the decoding process. Is there something preventing this compression? Or are they doing this already? <comment><USER2> How is "deflate + execution" going to be faster than "execution" when running the boot process?

The reason that modern operating systems take a fairly long time to start up is due to things like enumerating hardware for PnP, getting a network address from DHCP, and starting whatever system services are necessary for you to have a pleasant (if you want to call it that) user experience. It really doesn't have anything to do with the size of the executable files, since the CPU is going to have to run the same code to make it all happen anyway (you can't execute GZIP'd code and have it run faster).

<comment><USER3> I think his idea was that since the hard-drive is a bottle-neck, it would be faster to pull less data (compressed files) off the hard drive and do a little more work in memory (decompression) where it's faster.

I agree with you, though - I don't think that's really why it's slow - I'm just pointing out what he meant.

<comment><USER4> I think it is slow because of disk latency. To actually seek to find all these gazillion small configuration files. Just look at how boot up becomes much snappier when an SSD is used.

<comment><USER5> > I think it is slow because of disk latency.

And you even provided some supporting evidence. I don't think that it's conclusive, but until I'm willing to do the work....

> To actually seek to find all these gazillion small configuration files.

If that's the actual bottleneck, perhaps a different configuration system would be a better solution.

<comment><USER4> I do not see that happening. It is actually a good thing that each application can have their own isolated configuration that is tailored for the application's needs.

It is that most file systems are optimized for large files.

Reiser FS promised to be a killer FS, handling small files and arbitrary file- meta-data, but well... <insert un-tasteful joke here>.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When you're seeking to an idle disk, three things have an impact on speed: Seek time, file fragmentation, and file size. Given that your max throughput to any modern HDD is measured in megabytes per second, file size isn't the limiting factor. You've got to get the drive spinning, get the drive head to the right spot, and read it. If there's a pile of files, you've got to do that dozens of times if they're not stored near each other on disk. Compressing the files doesn't really solve this problem. What one might try, however, is arranging the disk storage such that the files are physically close to each other. One could even go so far as to mash all the startup stuff into one super-file.

To see this in benchmark form, look at the difference in drive speed tests between large reads (sequential) and small reads (random). You'll go from 60 Mb/s to 6 Mb/s when file size drops from gigabytes to kilobytes, because more of the time is spent seeking.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's a given in the software world that if you give a programmer a faster machine they'll produce slower code.

Developers should be using the oldest and least available memory machine they can lay their hands on.

Want to see a zippy starting system ? Install Xenix 386 on your 2.8 GHz machine. Or windows 95+trumpet winsock if that's your thing.

</comment><comment><USER8> Linux DOES use compressed files - BUT: decompression takes time too, so I'm not sure exactly how valuable this is. The real slowdown is waiting for hardware to intialise. The super fast linux booting that some people achieve is by clever elimination of services they don't need and by starting as many services as possible concurrently. The real slowdown is probing which hardware is plugged in.

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem is probably to find out which files these are. Not that it is hard to measure, but afaik there are no tools in place to do it right now.

</comment><comment><USER9> IIRC, initrd is also compressed.

</comment><comment><USER10> vmlinuz?

<comment><AUTHOR> Why not _all_ of the start-up files though? There are loads of other things (such as scripts) that are not compressed...

<comment><USER10> I expect it's for ease of editing when the system is up. Also remember there's a limit to what you can fit into a bootloader; an entire compressed filesystem might be too much.</comment></comment></comment>


My AI Timelines Have Sped Up - T-A https://www.alexirpan.com/2020/08/18/ai-timelines.html <comment><AUTHOR> Dang, 90% chance we'll have AGI* in 50 years? I would bet money against that prediction if I could. Any bookies out there? There's just no way AGI can replace blue collar work like plumbers and electricians, etc. that quickly. Programmers, also unlikely. Sure, you can have AIs generate more code for you, but then you'll just have the programmers working one abstraction layer up from that. Also, AI-generated entertainment always has and always will suck. I will eat my hat if an AI in 50 years can generate a full length, original hollywood-esque movie that I enjoy. Heck, I'll even settle for a book that can rival human authors.

Sure, I could see a lot of medical professions and other "knowledge bank" type jobs being replaced. I've always thought optometrists could largely be replaced with "measure my prescription" booths controlled by a computer. But anything requiring any creative juice whatsoever will likely not be replaced.

*Yes, it's not true AGI but AI that replaces 95% of all jobs

<comment><USER2> In 1900 the earth's population was 1.6 billion. In 1903 the Wright Brothers built the first airplane. In 1947, humans flew at supersonic speed for the first time. That was in the span of 50 years. 22 years later, we were on the moon.

A lot can happen in 50-70 years.

We now have 7 billion people, with more of the world coming online to do R&D. China, specifically, has made it a goal to lead the world in AI by 2025.

India's economy should grow over the next 2 decades and they will also become a world leader.

With so many resources, the world should easily advance more in the next 50 than it did in the last 100 years.

<comment><USER3> In the 50s and 60s aviation and space people often thought that things would keep improving exponentially, as they'd lived through such incredible advancements. Instead things slowed enormously, despite vast efforts put in.

We've lived through enormous computing advances, but it's been fairly obvious for some time that hardware improvements are slowing.

I'm sure there will be amazing advancements in the next 50 years, but I expect a lot of the progress to be in fields that are either currently unknown, or seem unimportant today. Those new fields will see better return on investment.

<comment><USER4> > despite vast efforts put in.

I disagree with that part. Things slowed dramatically because we stopped putting extreme amounts of effort in, largely because there wasn't enough market demand for aviation or space flight beyond 1970s technology... for a while.

<comment><USER5> The worldwide market for aviation and space launches is far larger now than in the 1970s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think there are fundamental questions still unanswered that could put the brakes on the whole thing.

For example, I would put forth that for a given problem, there is a lower limit to how simple you can make divided pieces of that problem. You can't compute the trajectory of a thrown baseball using only a single transistor. Granted most problems can be divided into _incredibly_ simple steps. The question we face is "is AGI reductive enough for human beings to create it?" Is the minimum work-unit for planning and constructing an AGI small enough to be understood by a human?

That's of course putting aside the problem of scale. The neocortex alone has 160 trillion synapses, each of which exhibits behavior far more complex than a single transistor. You could argue that for many commercially-viable tasks we've found much better ways than nature, and that's true, but AGI is a different game entirely. Our current AI methodologies may be as unrelated to AGI as a spear is to a nuclear missile despite them both performing the same basic function.

<comment><USER7> I think it is incorrect to say, that synapses exhibit more complex behavior in this context. How much of their behavior is actually part of cognition, as opposed to the needs of their own survival?

<comment><USER8> The synapse isn't the complex part of the brain. The synapse is just the part of the neuron membrane that is responsible for input and output. The complex part is how the synapse affects potentiality inside the neuron itself. The difference between a transistor and a neuron is that a transistor has discrete, digital states. A neuron is much less deterministic than that. If you want to try to find a part of the brain that may represent a transistor, it would be a network of a number of specific neurons that fire (or just as importantly, dont fire) within an even larger superstructure. Ultimately, you just can't draw a clean line between a transistor and the brain at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "10% chance by 2045, 50% chance by 2050"

I'm really pessimistic about the next 30 years, but really optimistic about the next 5 after that.

<comment><USER10> From the post: "I also noticed that my 2015 prediction placed 10% to 50% in a 5 year range, and 50% to 90% in a 20 year range. AGI is a long-tailed event, and there's a real possibility it's never viable, but a 5-20 split is absurdly skewed. I'm adjusting accordingly."

</comment></comment><comment> bra-ket Wishful thinking, make large and dumb models even larger, throw in more data and it will somehow magically lead to artificial common sense. The only thing missing is philosopher's stone and the right mix of hyperparameters.

<comment><USER11> >make large and dumb models even larger, throw in more data and it will somehow magically lead to artificial common sense.

What exactly do you think a human brain is?

<comment><USER12> Not an organ that performs backpropagation or gradient descent.

<comment><USER13> What if I tell you it is? Will that information back-propagate into your brain?

<comment><USER12> I'd ask you to show me how and where backpropogation takes place in the brain. Then I'd ask how thin you're willing to stretch the "neural net" metaphor to re-apply it to biology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This basically matches the timeline I arrived to after seeing GPT-2 in action, except 10% by 2045 is too low (coincidentally, he realized that also mismatches 50% by 2050).

I believe most people underestimate chances of AGI arrival because they overestimate humans. The famous post "Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences" got most of the point.

<comment><USER14> [https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/humans-not- concentrat...](https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/humans-not- concentrating)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is a race between AI and the massive disruptions of civilization due to climate change and the mass extinction of ecosystems. The fulfillment of those two are not mutually exclusive.

<comment> dane-pgp I agree, and I think that the Venn diagram of possible futures to consider includes not just AI, climate change and mass extinction of ecosystems, but also nuclear war.

<comment><USER16> Or even just nuclear accidents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Everyone remembers when you are right and no one remembers when you are wrong when you make timelines like this.

<comment><USER18> Honestly nobody's going to remember this prediction either way.

<comment><USER19> Really? He's a researcher at Google Brain; it's not like his words have no weight.

<comment><USER18> Big echo chamber here. 99+% of people (myself included) have never even heard of Google Brain.

<comment><USER20> I mean, I have no idea what the expert climate science groups are but I still trust that they have a better idea of what's going on than I do. In this case, they just happen to know that this is one expert AI group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't credit any predictions about AGI. We don't know enough about how _human_ intelligence works. On the software side, we don't know what pieces we are missing or what discoveries need to be made to make progress.

There is no way to predict when scientific discoveries will happen before they happen. This is a fools errand.

</comment><comment><USER13> > "For this post, I'm going to take artificial general intelligence (AGI) to > mean an AI system that matches or exceeds humans at almost all (95%+) > economically valuable work."

One doesn't have to be "economically valuable" to be considered intelligent. Think of philosophy majors, for instance.

Now, imagine an AI that could replicate the intelligence of a 6 year old; it wouldn't be "economically valuable" at first, but it would keep learning, year after year, until it exceed humans.

Wouldn't that be a prime example of an AGI? Or would it only be accepted as such when it matched or surpassed humans "at almost all (95%+) economically valuable work"? What if it decided to pursue a degree in philosophy?

When it happens, we will be _way_ past the first AGI, and entering the singularity.

</comment><comment><USER22> Narrow AI has made a lot of progress in recent years, but in my opinion we are completely lost regarding AGI.

<comment><USER23> Not completely, see this paper on a new neurobiological theory on consciousness [https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive- sciences/fulltext/S136...](https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive- sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613\(20\)30175-3) and this Twitter thread discussing it [https://twitter.com/jaaanaru/status/1298164256777658370](https://twitter.com/jaaanaru/status/1298164256777658370)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Alex Irpan's post inspired the AGI timelines discussion at [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hQysqfSEzciRazx8k](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hQysqfSEzciRazx8k) which shows 12 people's timelines as probability distributions over future years and their reasoning behind the distributions.

(I work on Elicit, the tool used in the thread.)

<comment><USER25> Have you tried plotting the CDFs? Might be easier to read than the overlaid areas.

<comment><USER24> Good idea. We'll integrate that into Elicit in a few weeks. In the meantime, here's a Colab that shows the CDFs: [https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1pl3fIaeIKIS77IDM_rn...](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1pl3fIaeIKIS77IDM_rnaFUyPpyRepFmT?usp=sharing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here's a random collection of thoughts that I have about the progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI):

Machine learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) in particular benefit from fast computer chips. The most impressive gains in AI in the 2010s (Computer Vision & Natural Language Processing) were made thanks to DL. There's a famous post by AI researcher Rich Sutton, which summarises this fairly neatly [1].

Now, this connection between DL and fast chips would tie the progress of AI pretty tightly to the progress of Moore's Law [2]. There's some compelling evidence that Moore's Law is at least slowing down [3]. On the other hand, there are industry experts like Jim Keller who pretty strongly disagree with these assessments [4] and even TSMC seems to be bullish on being able to keep up with Moore's Law [5].

Some estimates of GPT-3s training cost put it in the range of ~5-10 million dollars [6]. It's hard to say how big of an impact on the economy GPT-3 will have. It's probably safe to assume though, that OpenAI is already working on GPT-4. The jump in parameter sizes from GPT-2 to 3 was roughly 100x (1.5 billion vs. 175 billion) and I'm assuming the price of training the model increased in roughly the same proportion (I might be wrong here and if anyone can point me to evidence on this, it would be much appreciated). With these assumptions, and provided that GPT-4 won't be affected by diminishing returns of adding more parameters (big if), the price for it would be somewhere between 500 million and a billion dollars. That's still not an insane amount of money to put into R&D, but you'd probably want it to be at least be somehow economically viable to be able to justify putting a hundred billion dollars into GPT-5.

All this is to say, that I find making predictions of the progress of AI really hard due to the large amount of uncertainty related to the field and the underlying technologies (mainly the hardware).

[1]: [http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html](http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html)

[2]: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.05558.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.05558.pdf)

[3]: [https://p4.org/assets/P4WS_2019/Speaker_Slides/9_2.05pm_John...](https://p4.org/assets/P4WS_2019/Speaker_Slides/9_2.05pm_John_Hennessey.pdf)

[4]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc)

[5]: [https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/09/13/tsmc-thinks-it- can-u...](https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/09/13/tsmc-thinks-it-can-uphold- moores-law-for-decades/)

[6]: [https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/11/openai-launches-an-api- to...](https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/11/openai-launches-an-api-to- commercialize-its-research/)

</comment><comment><USER27> The power cost of transistorized agi will never compete with meat neurons , ever. It's still off by like 9 orders of magnitude and worsening

<comment><USER10> So, you think the median estimate (50% estimate) is in 25 Billion years?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> COVID-19 speedup quite many digital transformations like wars created infrastructures and advanced technologies. This might be the stone age of AI but one day some people will create one 'particle collider' as planet brain.</comment>


How to Get the Benefits of Fasting with Less Deprivation - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-get-the-benefits-of-fasting-with-less-deprivation-1487368174?mod=e2fb <comment><USER2> You could also try the ketogenic diet, it was developed exactly to mimic the effects of fasting as a treatment for epilepsy. Much of the development happened at the John Hopkins hospital. Recently the scientific evidence of advantages on treatment of Alzheimer's and other cognitive diseases has been accumulating.

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=ketogenic+diet+alzheime...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=ketogenic+diet+alzheimer%27s&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiwqIbB3ZvSAhUB6yYKHeboAFYQgQMIGDAA)</comment>


PHP 'magic_quotes_gpc' Directive Security Bypass Weakness - <AUTHOR> http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2012-0831

<comment><USER2> while I agree that a feature not working as intended is a bad thing, magic_quotes_gpc also is a very, very bad idea, is deprecated for years and is going to be gone from PHP 5.4.

Also, it never worked right ever since PHP supported more than just MySQL and mSQL (and even for these databases it doesn't work any more, especially since the advent of Unicode)

In fact, it works so badly that projects usually go out of their way to turn this mis-feature off or work around it before even looking at input data.

As such, I really think this is not newsworthy enough because applications still relying on this mis-feature already have different issues anyways (and are likely not running on hosts that can/want to update PHP)</comment>


The end of the road for the live concert business? - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703636404575353351111409566.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_LeadStoryNA <comment><USER2> So the Eagles' billion-dollar, 40-year run is starting to falter? Cry me a river. Ditto for the Limp Bizkit reunion tour, and Liz Phair. Those veins were played out 10 years ago. Their fans are older, and don't have the time or money to go out and see these acts.

But that's alright. The great thing about music is there are always talented upstarts willing to do the work on the ground floor in terms of songwriting and touring. Some of them will have no trouble bypassing the stadiums and Ticketmaster, and will sell out smaller clubs and connect with their fans in other ways, including online. They may not make a million bucks, but at least they're making good music.

</comment><comment><USER3> > To score a pair of tickets to see singer-songwriter John Mayer in Cincinnati > on July 27, Beth Collins of Radcliff, Ky., spent $172, including about $30 > in service fees, for the best two seats available on Ticketmaster at the > time, in section 700, adjacent to the rear lawn at the Riverbend Music > Center. Ms. Collins, a 27-year-old homemaker whose husband works in a UPS > warehouse, borrowed $75 from a local loan service to help pay for the seats; > with interest, she paid the service about $100.

I can't help but think this sort of thing is why poor people remain poor.

<comment><USER4> When you're down on your luck and unhappy, things that bring you pleasure are more desirable than ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just stopped seeing big acts.

It's a waste of time and money. Plus it's fun to discover new musicians that are good.

Most of the shows I go to only cost $10 to $15. I also end up getting to see a bunch of bigger acts at music festivals like ACL where you get a great bang for your buck.

</comment><comment><USER6> I stopped going to concerts because I got tired of either getting gouged by ticketmaster, or gouged by scalpers. I hope they go under.

<comment><USER7> >gouged by ticketmaster

gouged by promoters, rather.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > That's forcing artists to tour more, and to keep their ticket prices high, > despite the weak economy.

... and then Ticketmaster doubles it.

<comment><USER9> The music industry has got to be the largest industry I can think of which seems to be full of people that just fundamentally don't seem to understand the issues of supply and demand. And I don't mean the musicians, since that's not really what they are there for, I'm talking the management.

When demand drops, you have to have some combination of lowering the price, lowering the supply (smaller venues), or having excess production (in this case, empty seats). It doesn't matter if you blame the customers (really stupid), blame the economy, or blame the moon, some combination of those three things is going to happen. The laws of economics demand it. Most industries have money people that seem to actually understand this.

(The natural _hurr hurr_ response is to claim this is because they are used to just lobbying for things from the government, but it goes beyond that, just as in this article in which they appear mystified about what to do with empty seats and someone has to actually suggest that maybe the price needs to be dropped. Maybe if they hired an economics sophomore as an intern next year they could get this earthshakingly-brilliant idea before a news story is written.)

<comment><USER10> They understand perfectly. Hence the scrapped dates (with or without excuses), discounted tickets, changed venues, etc. described in the story.

They just work the press and whine a lot as a reflex action.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> it seems that the music industry was making more money than it ever should have been in the first place. when you look at declining sales compared to previous years, of course it seems like something is wrong, but perhaps the years that made the most amount of money were a fluke, and now things are headed back to where they should be.

in the past decade it has become incredibly easy to develop a fine-grained taste in music. the activation energy for seeking music you enjoy has essentially dropped to 0 (searching the internet vs listening to the radio or physically buying cds/tapes/records), which means less people can be fooled into liking bands like U2 or Limp Bizkit. it seems like a no-brainer that less people care about going to those concerts anymore. the music industry needs to update their model, they can't game the consumer into spending money as easily as they use to.

</comment><comment><USER12> The music at concerts is always far too loud. It's uncomfortable and I'm afraid of damaging my hearing.

<comment><USER13> This bothers me, as well. I can't speak to any proven efficacy, but when I find myself in such a loud venue (also some bars, obligatory parties such as before/at weddings, etc.), I take a "flesh colored" plain cylinder foam ear plug, cut in half, and place one half into each ear canal. My ears don't "crackle" -- the halves still seem to work pretty well -- and the smaller size is unobtrusive so I don't feel self-conscious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Lots and lots of details. Doesn't exactly draw an overall theme but gives you a _lot_ to chew on.

</comment><comment><USER15> Apparently an article about the music industry isn't complete without complaining about pirates.</comment>


Mail Your Hard Drive to Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/07/mail-your-hard-drive-to-amazon.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 <comment><USER2> There are several backup solutions (Arq, JungleDisk, etc) that will store your data on Amazon's S3 service. However, the restore process is fairly painful as it requires downloading potentially hundreds of GB which takes a long time. I'm aware of the hard drive service that Amazon offers, but AFAIK you're required to mail a drive to Amazon and they will put the data you want on it and mail it back. However, I've often thought that since Amazon also sells hard drives, they could skip a step and allow someone to purchase the disk, have Amazon can put the data on it, and mail it to the buyer. For people replacing a failed hard drive, it's likely that they will buy one from Amazon anyway, and this would save them a lot of time.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure if you contacted them first you can set the HDD to ship right to Amazon and they'll load it up and send it to your home address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum>

<comment><USER5> Well, a station wagon full of 32GB MicroSD cards would be even better :)

<comment><USER6> If you're going to say that then why not a juggernaut full of 32GB MicroSD cards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For large data, I think it's much more convenient. On similar note : [http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/09/us-safrica- pigeon-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/09/us-safrica-pigeon- idUSTRE5885PM20090909)

</comment><comment><USER7> Useful for companies, expensive for regular users

</comment><comment><USER8> Not to be snarky in any regard, but what is a use case for needing to upload an enormous EBS image? Like for some sort of non-deterministic data processing where you already have a large set of data to process?

<comment><USER9> If you're switching your app's hosting over to EC2 and want to transfer your hundreds of gigs of database files, this may be the easiest way to do it.

Also, I suspect the exporting data (for keeping physical backups) may be the more common use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Old news. This has been in place for years.

<comment><USER3> Wrong, it has been in place for S3. This applies to EBS volumes. Please read the article before you comment.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Have you ever made a demo (of demoscene culture)? - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

<comment><USER2> Nothing worth speaking of, but I made lots of mods, and despite years spent in real recording studios I still find a tracker to be lower friction for sequencing than "real" sequencers. When I was a kid with a C64 and later an Amiga, the demo scene was about the only software development I had any exposure to...so it certainly had an influence. But I think if I could go back in time and give my earlier self a gift, it'd be a UNIX system with proper development tools.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yep. The glorious days of mid to late 90s - even Australia had a buzzing scene. Why do you ask?

Future Crew are still the high point IMO. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_reality>

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I am very amused by the technological creativity that such groups demonstrate. It not only requires a strong sense of aesthetics but supreme coding skills as well.

But, surprisingly, such groups are not very known in startup world. I don't really know whether startups and demoscene should related in some manner but I find it odd that such a connection does not exist.

<comment><USER4> Maybe because the demoscene is more connected to the computergame industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am talking about demos such as .kkrieger ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger> ) which is a 3d FPS that is just 96 kb is size. How cool is that?

<comment><USER5> During the 90s I tried to learn enough to code some intros, but the learning curve is _super steep_ to do something like your demoscene idols create. Also tried to find momentum here in Chile but failed, so finally I joined a mostly European team called 'Ethereal' which produced at least one demo:

[http://pouet.net/nfo.php?which=3965&f=none](http://pouet.net/nfo.php?which=3965&f=none)

(I feature under the nickname 'eccp', on handdrawn graphics) ... I really enjoyed it while it lasted.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Canadian and American starting an online business? - <AUTHOR> I'm Canadian and am starting an online business with an American co-founder. Those titles are mostly meaningless, each of us will own 50%. We're not sure which country to incorporate in and what the best way to go about it is, and I've found surprisingly little information online. IANAL aside, does anyone have any experience with this and can point me in the right direction? <comment><USER3> Your location matters significantly more than your nationality - <USER2> it's a tax problem. For example: if you're in Canada and the business is US domiciled (and you own 50%), then decision making for that business and your share will be taxed in Canada. This is simplified - but you get the gist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I should have clarified we'll remain located in our home countries, working remotely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Justin Jackson (CA) started start-up with American co-founder. He podcasts and is active on social media. I think he may have some pointers if you reach out.

* [https://justinjackson.ca/](https://justinjackson.ca/)

* [https://transistor.fm/](https://transistor.fm/)

</comment><comment><USER5> There are some other details that need filled in.

Is it intended to be a permanently small'ish business or will it plausibly become a medium to large business if it's successful?

Will you be pursuing traditional venture capital and or any outside investors?

If things go well will you be hiring locally (such that you'll need office space) or do you aim to keep everything remote for the early going?

Which of the two partners is better qualified to handle the legal requirements & complexities of maintaining an incorporated entity, whether in the US or Canada?

Does one partner have a desire (more so than the other partner) to move to the other country if the business is successful?

Both have arguments in their favor depending on those answers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Do you have any interest in finding investors or selling the company to a major tech behemoth? If so, incorporating in the U.S. (particularly Delaware) will save some headaches.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you everybody for the help!

</comment><comment><USER7> Hi pgg; fellow Canadian here, have been in somewhat similar position; feel free to reach out (email is in profile).

Will this be a services business (e.g. consulting/work for hire) or selling of products/services?

There are many factors involved in the decision, e.g.:

\- If you incorporate in Canada, you may find you need to open a USD- denominated account with your bank here to avoid currency losses. You would probably also need a CAD account, and for selling in Canada you would need to account for GST and possibly provincial tax, depending on where you're based, since you would have a presence here. You could elect with CRA that your books are denominated in USD -- but be aware that multi currency accounting adds an extra layer of complexity to your life. With 50% shareholding defined up front, the bank here is probably going to want to have signatures from both shareholders to set up an account.

\- If you are soliciting sales in the US, you may be considered to have "nexus" in the US, probably based on the state of your co-founder (at least initially). That may mean reporting/filing obligations in that state, particularly if your sales go over a certain level. There are also obligations regarding tax filings in other states if you or co-founder travel there enough and sales there are high enough. Certain states are actively going after Canadian companies for these filings with heavy penalties. There comes a point where, to trade in the US, it is arguably just simpler to be incorporated in the US for those transactions. It is relatively easy to incorporate in the US (recommend Delaware) but the corporation will still need to be aware of its tax filing obligations in other states, particularly in the state your co- founder is based.

\- Depending on how you're planning on taking payments, it may be useful to know that e.g. Stripe will allow you to bill in USD and settle into a USD- denominated account in Canada (or in CAD/USD and settle into a CAD-denominated account with conversion as needed). But you should know that settlement times are different if you are settling to an account in Canada, vs an account in the US. IIRC Stripe starts out as taking 7 days to settle to an account in Canada, the shortest we've been able to get that to was 4 days after we built up some history. By contrast, we get our charges to US-based bank account settled in 2 days.

\- If you would be eligible to claim R&D tax credits, my sense is that (at least at present) the Canadian SR&ED scheme is easier/better than the US equivalent, both in terms of what you can get back and the amount of effort/time it takes. In either case, claiming an R&D credit would typically be dependent on being incorporated and running payroll in that country.

\- Your Canadian customers are probably going to expect/prefer to be dealing in CAD (with proper GST/HST/PST etc) with a Canadian company and bank. Your US customers are probably going to expect to be dealing in USD with a US-based company and bank. If you are physically shipping products, know that US customers in particular don't like cross-border shipments for several reasons (including that they are more expensive).

\- It can be helpful to have separate CAD and USD credit cards.

\- There are certain kinds of financing that are way easier to access when incorporated in the US. And others that are easier when incorporated in Canada.

So really what you are doing is optimizing for complexity, taxes, movement of currency, cash flow, filing overheads etc over all those factors.

While it really needs more info about your specific opportunity, one thought is to consider incorporating separately in both countries (eventually as the business grows, it may well end up there anyway). You could even start by you owing 100% of the Canadian company, your co-founder 100% of the US company, and having a simple business agreement between the two companies regarding how the name is controlled/shared/owned, and how profit is shared (e.g. on the basis of royalties) etc. Of course you could also set it up as one being subsidiary of another, but not doing that at the outset, will probably make it easier for you to start out.

<comment><USER8> Canadian operating a digital business here as well. Most of the above points are accurate.

One point I'll disagree with is the viability of s SRED. It's a documentation nightmare and hiring a consultant to file for you is basically mandatory - they take 25% of your return. IMO, not worth the distraction in general, and definitely not if you're questionably eligible due to u.s. status cofounder.

Canadian banks, even with USD accounts, are handicapped. ACH for example, is a non existent term at Canadian banks.

Canadian customers are fine paying USD, if your business is USD based. All your expenses/providers will be, so it only makes sense to bill in USD.

Nexus is a serious issue. Hire an accountant who is familiar with this. I learned for example, that _where your website is hosted_ is factored into the decision. You can claim to be Canadian, but offering services/downloads to u.s. customers served from a u.s. server counts as 100% u.s. As mentioned above, % of sales is another big factor. If you trip 51% (and you will, Canada is too small a market), you risk being assessed.

Incorporating and filing taxes will work out roughly the same in either country. I'd need the recommendation to incorporate in Delaware, and just file as a u.s. company.

<comment><USER7> Canadian customers paying in USD: I think it depends on the type of market and product. We've found competitive advantage in offering CAD pricing stability to our Canadian customers (B2B, both services and physical goods).

SR&ED: We've used it to great effect, and have never used a consultant. The rules are actually not that complicated; CRA presents seminars on how to determine what is eligible, as well as on how to complete the T661. It's a small time investment to attend those to determine if&how SR&ED can work for you. Documentation, it depends: lab notebooks and a spreadsheet of hours can go pretty far. They've tightened up process on first time claimants (all go through review now afaik), but at the same time they've introduced programs for first timers where you can get an opinion on eligibility ahead of time and can then check in with them periodically during the first period for their ongoing evaluation and comment, in which case they guarantee no surprises during the review. As always YMMV: for us SR&ED had the same effect as outsourcing our dev to a far lower cost country, but effectiveness is reduced if largely doing things like crud apps, or with single employees who are also substantial shareholders.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Find books that help you grow - <AUTHOR> https://www.flowreads.com/ <comment><USER2> Well curated picks for founders! I grabbed two audiobooks through your links.

Seems like a challenge could be to prove value over the native Amazon recommendations once you scale past a few niche categories though. Celebrity/Influencer lists could be one way to do that, but I'm sure you've thought through others.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I'm happy you like it.

I will add some more recommendation lists (like the 'Recommended by Bill Gates') soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does it just search the titles for whatever you enter? E.g. I've tried "programmer" and every single book it suggested had "programmer" in its title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, when searching it will search for titles. If you want books on programming, try to select one of the categories.</comment></comment>


Securing an HTTPS server (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-09-28-securing-https.html

<comment><AUTHOR> These days it would probably be better to use stud ([https://github.com/bumptech/stud](https://github.com/bumptech/stud)) than stunnel; cperciva even did a security review of stud. And for the majority of us running Linux rather than FreeBSD on our servers, Docker would be good for this kind of thing.</comment>


Hugh Gallagher's College Admissions Essay - <AUTHOR> http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/essay.htm

<comment><USER2> Hugh Gallagher later changed his name to Tim Feriss /oblig</comment>


Mystery Of How The Egyptians Moved Pyramid Stones Solved - <AUTHOR> http://www.iflscience.com/physics/mystery-how-egyptians-moved-pyramid-stones-solved

<comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7687391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7687391)

Same story from other sources:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7693922](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7693922)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689233)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7685464](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7685464)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7685013](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7685013)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682975)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682785)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678717](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678717)</comment>